Chinese Diasporic Films: A Case Study in Transnational Cinema
David Hanley
A Thesis in the
Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Film Studies) at
Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada
August, 2013
Concordia University
School of Graduate StudiesThis is to certify the thesis prepared
By: David Hanley
Entitled: Chinese Diasporic Films: A Case Study in Transnational Cinema And submitted in partial fulfillment for the requirements of the degree of
Master of Arts (Film Studies)
Complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respects to originality and quality.
Read and approved by the following jury members:
Paul Salmon External Examiner
John Locke Examiner
Peter Rist Supervisor
Approved by
September 19, 2013 Catherine Russell
Date Graduate Program Director
September 19, 2013 Catherine Wild
iii
ABSTRACT
Chinese Diasporic Films: A Case Study in Transnational Cinema David Hanley
In the 1980s and 90s, the mobile populations that have characterized our increasingly globalized world and the resultant creation of diasporic communities has been reflected in a large number of transnational films that challenge the model of national cinema.
Diasporic films, which are acutely concerned with identity and examine the tension between assimilation and retention of the immigrant’s home culture are transnational as they belong entirely neither to the adopted country in which they are made nor the homeland which they look back to. This study examines films made in roughly the same period that belong to a pan-Chinese diaspora, but are produced in the distinct
geographical and cultural contexts of Taiwan and North America. Using a model influenced by the work of Hamid Naficy, this thesis performs a close analysis of these films by exploring the differing ways in which they represent “home” space (the ethnic enclave which can serve as either fortress or prison), “host” space (the often hostile area dominated by the host community) and “intermediate” space (the borderline territory where competing ethnicities interact) in expressing the strategies and negotiations central to the immigrant experience. In this way, this thesis aspires to map out the process in which the global is transformed into a multitude of hybrids through contact with local contexts.
iv Special Thanks: Peter Rist Kaia Scott Malory Beazley Randolph Jordan Francisco Monar Ruth Barton Lindsey Campbell Zach Campbell Pao-chin Huang Rachel Jekanowski Jordan Kaufman Teresa Elizabeth Lobos
Michael G. Smith Donato Totaro Olivia ward Haidee Wasson . . . and my family
For my parents
v Table of Contents
Introduction . . . .1
Transnational and Diasporic Cinema . . . .2
Chinese Diasporic Cinema . . . .10
Methodology . . . 15
Literature Review . . . .18
Chapter 1: Hou Hsiao-hsien, a Taiwanese Filmmaker . . . 22
Historical Context . . . .23
Hou Hsiao-hsien . . . 26
A Time to Live, a Time to Die (1985) and A Summer at Grandpa’s (1984) . . . 30
The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) and Dust in the Wind (1986) . . . .41
A City of Sadness (1989) . . . 48
Good Men, Good Women (1995) and Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) . . . 52
Conclusion . . . .59
Chapter 2: Mina Shum, an Independent Filmmaker . . . 60
Historical Context . . . .63
Multiculturalism . . . .67
Cinematic Portraits of Chinese Canadians . . . .72
vi Wayne Wang . . . .79 Conclusion . . . .82 Conclusion . . . .84 Bibliography . . . 88 Filmography . . . 92
- 1 - Introduction
In the Canadian film Double Happiness (1994, Mina Shum), the lead character, Jade Li, addresses the camera directly and describes her family as “very Chinese, if you know what I mean.” What exactly she does mean by this statement to some extent depends on who “you” is. On the most basic level, the comment creates a link between her and the audience that excludes the “very Chinese” characters, such as her father, the film presents. However, as Brenda Austin-Smith argues, “the phrase ‘if you know what I mean’ signals the multiple audiences Jade has in mind, including those whose knowledge arises from similar experiences of family membership and those whose ‘knowledge’ is, perhaps, rooted in stereotypes” (207). That writer-director Mina Shum is aware of these multiple audiences is shown by her comment recalling the experience of watching her films with an audience and hearing “trickles of different laughters from the crowd, depending on what cultural background that person came from” (Spaner 138).
It is this multiple address that is one of the most distinctive aspects of diasporic cinema. In the case of Double Happiness, a story concerning Chinese Canadians in Vancouver, Shum was conscious while making the film that members of her own community would experience the film in a different way than non-Chinese Canadians, which in turn is different from the way it would be experienced by non-Canadian Chinese, and different again from those who are neither Canadian nor Chinese. The film is
certainly more “Chinese” than just about any other Canadian film, but it would likely strike most non-Canadian Chinese as “very Canadian” (Austin-Smith and Melnyk 2). Both views of the film are correct, as it plays off a variety of cultural references and assumptions, some of which are more accessible to the international Chinese audience
- 2 - and others that play to a non-Chinese Canadian one. The ability to offer an “insider” perspective of a community that is both within and without distinct national borders, simultaneously local and transnational and consequently intensely preoccupied with identity, is a defining characteristic of diasporic cinema.
Transnational and Diasporic Cinema
Diasporic films are narratives of immigration and exile where protagonists negotiate the tension between creating new identities appropriate to their new host
country while deciding what to retain from their original homeland. These are not simply stories about immigrants, but stories about immigrant communities told by filmmakers who identify themselves as members of the diasporic community portrayed. Diasporic cinema has been a stream running through the history of film. From the Hollywood Golden Age films of Irish American directors such as John Ford and Leo McCarey to the pre-World War II Yiddish cinema and on to contemporary work, such as Magheri-French “Beur cinema” or Fatih Akin’s recent films set in Germany’s Turkish community, and on again to many other examples, the immigrant’s journey, either explicitly or in coded form, has been retold again and again. This thesis examines Chinese diasporic films made in two different locations, Taiwan and North America, during a period running from the early 1980s to 2000. Like Double Happiness, the films to be discussed can be seen as Chinese as they are made by ethnic Chinese filmmakers and concern ethnic Chinese communities that identify mainland China as their “motherland,” but are produced outside of the context of mainland Chinese national cinema.
Despite being products of different types of diasporic communities, the chosen films are all in dialogue with not only the countries in which they are made and their
- 3 - respective national cinemas, but with their common homeland, and indeed with each other as members of the same international diaspora. They reflect a similar ongoing tension between assimilation and maintenance of a distinct ethnic identity, but their different geographic, historical and cultural contexts mean that while they ask similar questions, they do not necessarily produce the same answers. Even within a specific diaspora, it is possible to see different filmmakers produce different responses to these questions. It is the suggestion of this thesis that a useful way to explore the similar and different ways diasporic films respond to questions of identity is through an analysis of their spatial representations. The worlds presented in diasporic films can, through this analysis, be seen as a series of spaces, and the differing ways in which they represent “home” space (the ethnic enclave which can serve as either fortress or prison), “host” space (the often hostile area dominated by the host community) and “intermediate” space (the borderline territory where competing ethnicities interact) serve to illuminate how diasporic cinema can express the strategies and negotiations central to the immigrant experience.
What this model hopes to offer is an analytical tool that can map out the relations between the different films while respecting their diversity of responses. This thesis seeks to use this tool in discussing films made at roughly the same time that have a common root in Chinese culture, but are produced in two distinct political and cultural contexts. Examining how selected ethnic Chinese filmmakers working within these different contexts use space to express how immigrants deal with tensions related to cultural identity can point to the different ways a specific, if broadly defined, culture can evolve depending on the local circumstances it interacts with and produce resolutions to
- 4 -
the problems filmmakers raise that reflect their specific contexts. In particular, this thesis is interested in the ways these films juxtapose an “inside space,” typically associated with the immigrant family serving as a microcosm of the larger diasporic community, and an “outside space,” representing the host community, offering them as twin magnetic poles of the immigrant’s life.
The analytical strategy is strongly influenced by Hamid Naficy, who writes that in what he calls “accented cinema,” the mise-en-scène “conveys and embodies displacement and emplacement in its configuration of space and in the manner in which characters occupy the space” (2001: 153-154). Typically, “claustrophobic spaces,” featuring small areas, the frame cluttered with people or objects, parts of the screen blocked off or individuals framed in tight close-ups or frames-within-frames, such as doorways, are played off against “spaces of immensity,” large open areas, with figures in long shot or framed against sweeping landscapes (1994: 12). The question becomes which spaces are ethnically coded and what meanings are ascribed to these spaces. A closed space can be confining or nurturing, an open one liberating or lonely; and either can express
ambivalence by mixing positive and negative attributes. The point is that in diasporic cinema, spaces can be used to express tensions related to the deterritorialized immigrant’s (and deterritorialized filmmaker’s) construction of identity.
Naficy’s concept of accented cinema encompasses more than just diasporic films. It is often referred to as “transnational cinema,” a term Naficy uses in his article “Phobic Spaces and Liminal Panics: Independent Transnational Film Genre” (1994), but abandons for the more nuanced and expansive “accented cinema” in his 2001 book An Accented Cinema. However, for the subjects discussed in this thesis, “transnational” is used for
- 5 - largely the same purposes. This term refers to a group of films that have become larger and more visible as a result of the growth and proliferation of diasporic communities over the past few decades, a by-product of the large scale migrations that have characterized our increasingly globalized, transnational world. In a survey of recent literature on transnational cinema, Will Higbee and Song Hwe Lim point to three main approaches that scholars have taken to the subject. The first sees transnational films as a rejection of the concept of national cinema as “limiting,” since it is less useful in understanding “cinema’s relationship to the cultural and economic formations that are rarely contained within national boundaries” (9). The focus here is on conditions of production and distribution, looking at international co-productions, filmmakers who cross borders easily and are not identified with a particular national cinema or films that play the festival circuit or are distributed, perhaps even primarily intended, for audiences outside of the country in which they are made. A second approach they identify is studying
transnational films as regional phenomena, “film cultures/national cinemas which invest in a shared cultural heritage and/or geo-political boundary” (9). A possible example is, of course, Chinese diasporic cinema, and while it is not the guiding theory of this thesis, it is important to engage with the question of the extent to which the concept of diasporic cinema challenges the idea of national, or supra-national, cinema. The third approach is one that is identified with Naficy, among others, and looks at films “characterized by issues of migration, loss and displacement that lead to identities in flux, which . . . challenge the stable and fixed (hegemonic) concept of the national” (2001: 10).
According to their analysis, what is interesting about Chinese diasporic cinema is not its “Chineseness,” which it suggests is transformed by engagement with the local into
- 6 -
multiple and distinct hybrid entities, but its usefulness as a case study in transnational cinema. In support of this approach, Naficy argues for the presence of a group style, the “consistent use of technique across the works of several directors” (2001:20), among “accented” filmmakers of various ethnicities working in various places of the world, but all working outside the mainstream of their respective national cinemas and sharing backgrounds involving displacement and deterritorialization (2001:21).
Among “accented” films, Naficy identifies three major types: ethnic, exilic and diasporic. He does not see these as mutually exclusive categories. While some films may contain only the characteristics of one of them, many transnational films cross these borders as easily as they do national ones and contain a mixture of all three types in different measures (2001: 29). Ethnic films are primarily concerned with a diasporic community’s identity within the host society with relatively little attention given to the “motherland.” They are similar to the work of what Naficy calls “poststudio American ethnics” such as Woody Allen, but are made by filmmakers who are either immigrants or the children of immigrants, often belonging to non-white, postcolonial ethnic
communities. Since this type of film “deals with the exigencies of life here and now” (Naficy 2001: 44) and “highlights links of the immigrant to the adopted country,” it is also the least distanced from mainstream national film industries (Marchetti 2006: 26). Conversely, exilic films are primarily concerned with the relationship between the immigrant and the country of origin. Rather than the “here and now,” exilic filmmakers are concerned with recreating the “sight, sound, taste, and feel of an originary experience, of an elsewhere at other times” (Naficy 2001: 11). Appropriately, diasporic films are in some ways a hybrid of the other two types, feeding on narrative tension created by a
- 7 - preoccupation with both the “here and now” and the “elsewhere at other times.” This reflects the nature of diaspora itself, which Yingchi Chu describes as “the space between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ between their resident society in their host territory, and their
homeland of origin” (25). Rather than a vertical and primary relationship with either host or homeland, diasporic films exist at the centre of a series of horizontal and plural
relationships with host, homeland and the variety of other communities within the same specific worldwide diaspora. (Naficy 2001: 14, Marchetti 2006: 26).
William Safran defines “diaspora” as an expatriate minority community that shares several, though not necessarily all, of a series of defining characteristics, which include a history of dispersion from an original homeland to two or more “peripheral” regions; a collective memory or myth about that homeland; a feeling of alienation stemming from a belief that full acceptance by the host country has not been given and might be impossible to achieve; a vision of the ancestral homeland as the community’s true home to which they or their descendants will return “when conditions are
appropriate”; a collective commitment to the maintenance (or restoration), safety and prosperity of the original homeland; and an “ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity” defined by a continuing relationship to the homeland (Safran 83-84). Although the focus in Safran’s definition shows a preoccupation with homeland that is more aligned with exilic cinema than the diasporic type, it contains points that are useful in distinguishing between the two. Naficy argues that while both diaspora and exile may be rooted in a traumatic, forced scattering of a population, diasporas can also be created by economically motivated migrations or as part of a colonial project. Further, while an exile can be individual or collective, diasporas are by definition collective in origin and
- 8 - destination and “the nurturing of a collective memory, often of an idealized homeland, is constitutive of the diasporic community” (2001: 14). Therefore, while exilic films can be about individuals alone in a strange land, diasporic films always present their
protagonists in the context of the diasporic community. It is interesting that Naficy qualifies his description of diasporic collective memory as often, rather than always, being of an idealized homeland, since in films about non-exilic diasporas the homeland might not be constructed as a lost paradise, but instead represented at least as
ambivalently as the adopted country.
There are a number of formal and thematic characteristics which Naficy and others associate with diasporic cinema. Among the most important is hybridity, the mixing of elements by the interaction of the diasporic protagonist (and the film text in which the protagonist appears) with both host and home country. Stuart Hall writes: “Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing
themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (394). The resulting hybridity “provides an alternative to complete assimilation, on the one hand, and a fundamentalist adherence to old cultural forms, on the other” (Leach 125). It is this tension, according to Patricia Erens, that creates a “diasporic aesthetic” which “both produces and is produced by a specific cultural environment” (46). There is a paradoxical outcome, since it is implied that while there is a shared aesthetic that cuts across borders and cultures, each diasporic instance, through its distinctiveness, creates a unique variation – a hybrid of local and global that is always the same, but always different.
Not surprisingly for films associated with the interaction of different cultures through immigration, one of the most popular narrative forms is the journey film. Often,
- 9 - this involves recreating the immigrant’s journey in allegoric form: from city to country, from ghetto to suburb, from dust bowl to California. As Naficy writes, “these journeys are not just physical and territorial but are also deeply psychological and philosophical” (2001: 6), and often reflect a parallel change in identity from exilic to diasporic and on the way to ethnic. These coded journeys will also often feature journeys within journeys, where members of the diaspora are separated from community and family, recreating an exilic situation in the adopted country and reflecting an ongoing “preoccupation with deterritorialization and unbelonging” (Naficy 2001: 290).
This thesis is particularly interested in the way diasporic films use the narrative device of the family as a microcosm for the larger diasporic community, typically as “a unit that is under tremendous pressure” (Naficy 2001: 290). While such a pressure often plays out in frayed personal relationships, it is often sparked by the difficulty of
maintaining traditional customs and markers of identity in an assimilationist host society. Several of the films to be discussed frame questions of identity through the juxtaposition between traditional parents and restive offspring who were either born in the new country or arrived there as a child, a situation not coincidentally mirrored by many of the
filmmakers associated with diasporic cinema. These filmmakers also share their young protagonists’ weaker connection to the diaspora’s collective memory of homeland. However, while their films often offer a sympathetic treatment of youthful rebellion, it does not necessarily mean that the attitude toward the traditional older generation is hostile. On the contrary, the loosening of the tie to parents and homeland is often tinged with nostalgia, of which Walter Benjamin once wrote: “Anything about one which one knows that one soon will not have it around becomes an image” (87). In this way, the
- 10 - nostalgic curiosity that diasporic protagonists and filmmakers experience when
calculating what they have lost in the formation of their hybridized identities, and their recreation of this loss as a cinematic image, responds to and echoes their parents’ yearning for an identity based on a “pure local past when things were uncorrupted (in a sense not yet hybridized)” (Chu Yiu Wai 323). It is the looming disappearance of the traditional culture which creates interest in it. The implied identification of filmmaker with young diasporic protagonist is another common feature of these films and Naficy includes “the inscription of the filmmakers” on to the film text among their defining characteristics (2001: 276). The inscription of the filmmakers appears in various forms, including direct address to the camera, voiceover narration, self-reflexivity, incorporation of autobiographical details into the storyline and narratives framed as memory pieces.
Chinese Diasporic Cinema
Given its fractious political history, involving centuries of division and civil wars and a disastrous encounter with Western imperialism, along with its multiplicity of languages and wildly diverse regions, there is an argument that a large proportion of mainland Chinese films can be read as diasporic. There have certainly been many films about identity forged through long journeys, crossing borders and exile, and precursors can be found in Chinese literature that share the same preoccupations. Indeed, of the “Four Great Classical Novels” of pre-modern Chinese fiction, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms deals with a period when the country was divided into three feuding regions, Journey to the West is a transformative journey narrative, and The Water Margin is the tale of a community made up of political exiles plotting their return home. All have been made into films, with The Water Margin a particular favourite of Hong Kong filmmakers,
- 11 - who seem to find a special resonance in it and have produced numerous remakes and variations. However, there is disagreement about the extent to which generalizations can be made about Chinese culture, let alone cinema.
Sheldon H. Lu argues that as a result of various factors, notably the division of China into a number of distinct geopolitical entities in the nineteenth century (mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan) and the globalization of the Chinese film industry’s mechanisms of financing, production and distribution in the 1990s era of transnational capitalism, “Chinese national cinema can only be understood in its transnational
context” (1997: 3). He considers the Chinese film industry a paradigm for the changes in world cinema, and the growth of transnational cinema a challenge to the idea of national cinema. For example, if a production receives most of its financing from Hollywood, features stars from various parts of Asia speaking Mandarin in a melange of accents, is filmed in mainland China, has a Taiwanese-American director who has also worked in Europe, and is marketed primarily for a worldwide rather than a domestic audience, can you call it a Chinese film? If not, then what is the best way to describe Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, Ang Lee)? More and more, one thing it is not is unusual. In addition, an increasingly mobile population has also changed the nature of the ethnic Chinese diaspora and the potential market for Chinese films, since the combined
population of China’s primary “peripheral areas,” Hong Kong (7.1 million), Taiwan (23.3 million) and Singapore (5.2 million), is now less than the approximately 36 million other “overseas Chinese,” an increasing proportion of them concentrated in North American cities (Fore 117). Further complicating the question of who these films are speaking to is a simultaneous increase in interest from non-Chinese audiences since, as David Bordwell
- 12 - pointed out in the late 1990s, “Chinese language filmmaking, active in several countries, has become central to world film culture” (141). Sheng-mei Ma notes that this newly transnational audience multiplies the ways in which these films are consumed, since “what a (Chinese) immigrant audience considers a nostalgic moment over an irretrievable Chineseness may turn out to be an exotic/ethnic tour for a Westerner venturing into an alien culture” (193). The multiplication of sources for the films and an increasing variety of destinations inevitably begs the question of just how Chinese these films continue to be and whether it has led to an inevitable dilution of cultural specificity.
This, in turn, raises the problem of defining Chinese cultural specificity. Steve Fore notes increasing debate among scholars concerning the notion of a “cultural China,” defining it as “a universalizing assertion of pride and unity that ostensibly connects all people of Chinese ethnicity all over the world” (117). This idea has been the subject of withering comment. Aiwa Ong criticizes any positioning of a singular history or “cultural core” as a primary and fixed source for identity as an “essentializing notion of Chineseness,” tartly remarking that “sometimes we forget that we are talking about one-quarter of the world’s population” (111). Gina Marchetti also argues this is a flawed approach since while China is indeed a nation, it is also “a divided political, polyglot, multiethnic, multi-cultural entity, with dramatic rifts between classes, genders, sexual orientations, etc.” (1998: 69). James Udden agrees, writing that “what Chinese culture means in Taiwan is radically different than what it means in mainland China, or even Hong Kong” (7). In any examination of a Chinese diasporic film, Ong, Marchetti and Udden’s approaches would focus more on what it reveals about transnational cinema or
- 13 - individual national cinemas than what it might say about a supra-national,
border-crossing Chinese cinema.
On the other hand, Nick Browne, warning against overemphasizing the
differences between China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, asserts there is a “common cultural tradition of social, ideological, and aesthetic forms that stands behind and informs Chinese cinema as a whole” (1). For him, it is important to balance the differences created by geography and history with common cultural elements, because while it is impossible to refute the hazards of insisting on a single hegemonic Chinese culture, it is equally impossible to deny the presence of common cultural markers in these films regardless of their provenance. Further, no matter how distinct from each other the cinemas of mainland China, Taiwan and other ethnic Chinese diasporas have become, there is a relationship between them that does not exist between any one of them and, say, Swedish or Uruguayan cinema. Therefore, while this thesis is primarily interested in Chinese diasporic films because of their transnational character, their common Chineseness is also implicated. In particular, while spatial analysis has been used by Naficy and others on all diasporic films, it becomes particularly useful in the Chinese case because the traditional Confucian model of social order is partly based on the concept of “inside” and “outside,” with the extended family being the primary inside grouping. In this system, individuals might find family rules and hierarchies restrictive, but breaking away means they no longer “belong” and therefore can no longer benefit from the family’s help (Levitin 275). A more perfect analogy for the relationship between the immigrant and the diasporic community is hard to imagine.
- 14 - This thesis examines selected films from two of China’s major diasporas: Taiwan and North America. There are of course many sub-communities within these large groups and many other Chinese diasporic communities scattered around the globe, but these two communities are useful because they have produced representative examples of films about the Chinese immigrant experience, they comprise distinctly different types of diasporic communities, and the period examined was particularly important for both of them.
In Taiwan, a long period of martial law ended in 1987, and the next decade brought a series of reforms that led to a gradual transition from a one-party state to a multi-party democracy. Part of this reform process involved a relaxation of censorship, allowing filmmakers to explore the post-World War II origins of the state, in particular its blood-soaked takeover by anti-communist refugees from mainland China and the ensuing societal division between the diasporic waishengren, post-1945 arrivals who
monopolized political power during the martial law period and make up about 15% of the population, and benshengren, Taiwanese of Chinese descent who make up about 84% of the population (the remaining 1% being aboriginal) (Udden 17). In North America, the 1980s and 90s featured the emergence of multiculturalism as an intellectual and policy issue (Marks 2), particularly in Canada, and the related release of several films by a new generation of Chinese-American and Chinese-Canadian filmmakers who, in the context of often racist or patronizing portrayals of their communities, began to take control of the images that represented them on film.
One diasporic community exercised political control despite its minority status, which persisted even though its ethnicity was shared with the majority, while a second
- 15 - was a largely powerless minority faced with a much larger, and often hostile non-Chinese host community. In each case, a major component of the community’s adaptation was an abandonment of the first generation immigrant definition as an exilic community in favour of a search for an identity that could encompass both their Chinese origins and the sense that their communities had developed identities clearly distinct from mainland China. In both cases, political and cultural changes that made members of these diasporas revise earlier ideas of identity were reflected in films made by members of these communities, and above all that is what these diasporas, in their own distinct ways, have in common during the period discussed.
Methodology
This thesis will examine selected films using an analytical model influenced by the work of Hamid Naficy. As discussed, he argues that the diasporic filmmaker, geographically cut off from his homeland but not integrated into his adopted country, is deterritorialized. This leads to a preoccupation with place which is expressed through representations of “open” and “closed” spaces through the use of mise-en-scène. Among the strategies he lists that are used to create open spaces are “external locations and open settings and landscapes, bright natural lighting, and mobile and wandering diegetic characters” (2001: 153). Conversely, closed spaces are associated with “closed-shot compositions, tight physical spaces within the diegesis, barriers within the mise-en-scène and the shot that impede vision and access, and a lighting scheme that creates a mood of constriction and blocked vision” (2001: 213). Naficy also discusses “transitional” spaces. These are transitional and transnational spaces that are not associated with either host or homeland and can be either spaces associated with travel, such as “borders, tunnels,
- 16 - seaports, airports, and hotels” or means of transportation, such as trains or buses (2001: 5). Naficy notes that as “people rarely go from a place of origin directly to a permanent place of exile,” that these “transitional places” also play a part in forming the immigrant’s new identity (2001: 152). He describes these spaces as “cathartic borders,” sites of “encounter, confession and transformation” (Naficy 2001: 234; Yue 17-18). As the films this thesis focuses on are not, for the most part, journey narratives, Naficy’s concept will be adapted through the use of the concept of “diasporic space” as proposed by Avtar Brah, who defines it as that place “’inhabited’ not only by those who have migrated and their descendants but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous” (181). Since the immigrant’s integration into the host society is no more direct than the journey from origin to permanent place of exile, this thesis proposes the existence of “intermediate spaces” which are not used to represent host or homeland. Instead, these are the spaces in which members of a diasporic community come into contact with representatives of the host culture. They are, in a sense, also transitional even though no literal border is crossed, as they chart a necessary passage in the construction of the immigrant’s new hybrid identity. That is, although Naficy’s “transitional spaces” are literally places or vehicles where travel takes place, this thesis’ concept of “intermediate spaces” refers to actual places, but any travel that occurs is typically metaphorical. As with what this thesis calls “home” and “host” space, the meaning ascribed to
“intermediate” space can be either positive, negative, or a mixture of the two. As Naficy writes, “the connotations of open, closed, and transitional forms do not reside inherently or permanently in these forms; their significance and meaning must be derived from the contexts in which they are deployed” (2001: 154).
- 17 - In Chapter One, this analytical model will be used to explore diasporic cinema in the context of Taiwan by examining several films by Hou Hsiao-hsien. Hou was the first filmmaker to take advantage of the relaxation of martial law to probe the violent origins of modern Taiwan and the subsequent ethnic tension and ruthless persecution of political opposition. He is also a diasporic figure, having been born in Guangdong, in mainland China, in 1947 and moved to Taiwan at the age of two, making him a member of the waishengren minority. His parents initially expected to stay only a few years before returning “home” to China and his films are intimately concerned with the difficulties facing diasporic newcomers like his family. In A Summer at Grandpa’s (1984) and A Time to Live, a Time to Die (1985), Hou uses small town rural settings to represent mainland China and the traditional values the immigrant generation identifies with their homeland to track the fading of the waishengren dream of a triumphal return to the mainland and their children’s waning commitment to their community’s collective diasporic myths. The Boys from Fengkuei (1983) and Dust in the Wind (1986) are classic journey narratives, following groups of young men who leave their small towns to find work in larger metropolitan centers. Usually discussed in terms of their portrayal of the country’s industrialization or the lead character’s coming of age, they can also be read as coded retellings of the immigrant journey, with small town and big city standing in for China and Taiwan. Spatial representation is used in an innovative way to portray the arrival and takeover of Taiwan by his parent’s generation of waishengren in A City of Sadness (1989). Finally, Good Men, Good Women, Good Women (1995) and Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) will be discussed in terms of how they use space to portray the death of the exilic dream and its implications for his community’s search for identity.
- 18 - In Chapter Two, selected films from the period where the rise of multiculturalism and independent cinema opened space for members of ethnic Chinese communities in North America to tell their stories onscreen will be examined. The main subject of this chapter is Mina Shum, who was born in Hong Kong in 1966 to parents who had moved there from mainland China and continued on to Vancouver, landing there when Shum was one. Her first feature film, Double Happiness (1994), was one of the best, as well as most popular, of films that emerged in Canada in the 1990s as a result of the federal government’s multiculturalism project. One filmmaker whose work will be used to explore Shum’s use of space to express diasporic tensions is Wayne Wang, who was born in Hong Kong in 1949, also to mainland Chinese parents, attended university in San Francisco, and then returned there in the late 1970s after gaining experience in the Hong Kong film industry. His pioneering films Chain Is Missing (1982) and Dim Sum (1984) offer an interesting counterpoint to Shum, coming as they do from a larger, more
established immigrant community.
Literature Review
Stuart Hall argues there are at least two ways of approaching the concept of “cultural identity.” The firsts posits the existence of a single culture, held in common by “people with a shared history and ancestry,” which provides “stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning” and persists underneath any surface
changes required by adapting to changing times or geography (223). The second position, preferred by Hall, is that history intervenes to create significant differences. While
- 19 - seen as “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being,’” a dynamic hybrid undergoing constant transformation through interaction with “place, time, history and culture” (225).
William Safran also emphasizes the local. He argues that, despite not meeting all his criteria, the various Chinese expatriate communities can all be considered genuine diasporas. However, he draws a distinction between those communities, particularly in the United States and Canada, where the homeland myth and, therefore, diaspora consciousness, have become attenuated due to the lessening of discrimination and consequent expansion of economic opportunities, which in turn have led to a weakening of the connection to the Chinese language and culture, and those like Taiwan and Hong Kong, which exist in Chinese-language societies (89). This thesis will suggest that although the distinction Safran draws is undeniable, pressures caused by what Hall would describe as the intervention of “history” have led to the creation of distinct hybrid
identities in both diasporas discussed.
These approaches are related to that of Naficy, who writes that “loosened from the biological moorings of blood and descent, identity is now recognized as socially
produced” (269). This goes back to the roots of the concept of transnational cinema in postcolonial theory, with part of its project being the dismantling of the idea of national cinema as an extension of a western (neocolonial) construct of national culture (Higbee and Lim 9, Chu Yiu Wai 321). His use of “accented style” allows him to sweep away “national” labels and find formal similarities that “cut across gender, race, nationality, and ethnicity, as well as across boundaries of national cinemas, genres, and authorship” (2001: 39). However, his analysis only applies, as Naficy notes, to films on the margins of national industries. Transnational cinema exists as an alternative to dominant practices,
- 20 - but national cinema persists and is an important element in the hybrids created in various diasporas. As Chris Berry writes, “no transnational cinema exists without encountering and negotiating national spaces and cultures” (2010: 112). So while this thesis finds arguments concerning the centrality of history and the local very powerful, it does not entirely reject the importance of pan-Chinese cultural markers in the films discussed.
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films are not generally discussed as being primarily diasporic. Naficy, for example, never mentions him. In No Man an Island (2009), James Udden argues that place and history are the most important influences on Hou’s work. He suggests that locating Hou’s distinctiveness in his roots in Chinese culture is
“essentialist” (1), since it is a culture that is so varied and multi-faceted that “to merely say Hou’s films are very Chinese does not say very much at all” (7). For Udden, Hou’s identification with the benshengren majority rather than his own waishengren community is the key to discussing his work, which “expresses an ambivalent hybridity” and an overall hesitant sense of identity (118). Fredric Jameson, in “Remapping Taipei” (1994), also emphasizes the distinctive Taiwanese quality of Hou’s films, discussing them in terms of their mapping the industrialization and modernization of the country. While he sees the rootless, atomized characters who are cut off from tradition, history or a sense of a shared national identity that are found in films by Hou or other New Taiwanese Cinema directors, such as Edward Yang, to be typical of anywhere in the modern industrialized world, Taipei’s post-1945 political and cultural history offers a unique vantage point to chart these changes. Nick Browne, on the other hand, sees “a strong sense of the continuity of Chinese culture and history” in Hou’s films, which he discusses as a “sustained meditation on the social evolution of Taiwan and the personal and familial
- 21 - meaning of the progressive urbanization of the island” (5). While all these scholars recognize the importance of the fading of the dream of returning to the mainland, none of them treat Hou’s work as diasporic. William Tay offers an insightful analysis when he notes “a constant tension between two worlds, or perhaps between two value systems” running through Hou’s work (155), but does not suggest this city-country opposition, which the other writers also emphasize, might also be seen as a displacement of a similar China-Taiwan tension. This thesis does not suggest they are in any way wrong, but it is possible that a new lens might offer a different, and legitimate, perspective.
Laura U. Marks places Chinese-Canadian and Chinese-American films of this period in the context of the growing force of multiculturalism and the related changes in the availability of funding for non-commercial cinema (2), while Brenda Austin-Smith notes that Mina Shum’s work expresses an ambivalence to both home and host culture that easily fits into Naficy’s transnational model(209). While filmmakers like Mina Shum and Wayne Wang can be discussed in terms of their relationships to specific localities (Vancouver and San Francisco, respectively), this thesis argues that despite their different conclusions concerning relationships with the diasporic communities they belong to, they share important affinities that help explore and illuminate questions relating to Chinese diasporic cinema.
- 22 - Chapter 1: Hou Hsiao-hsien, a Taiwanese Director
In Olivier Assayas’ 1997 documentary HHH – un portrait de Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan’s best known international filmmaker is asked whether he considered himself a Chinese or Taiwanese director, and Hou answers: “Cultural-wise you can’t deny that you are Chinese. But the political reality . . . [is] you can’t deny that you are Taiwanese. A Taiwanese director.” What being Taiwanese precisely means is one of the central
concerns of Hou’s films of the 1980s and 90s, and it is intimately tied to his investigation of the island nation’s history and the implications that investigation has on his ambivalent feelings toward the diasporic community he was born into. This ambivalence, in turn, can be read in the way he uses space to express these feelings.
Any discussion of Hou’s work has to begin with Taiwan’s past. As June Yip writes: “Of all the New Cinema directors, no one has been more concerned with Taiwanese history” (140). His films are set in specific times and play off specific historical events that, even if they are rarely spelled out and are instead presented in indirect and suggestive ways, add layers of meaning to the episodic and quotidian actions that tend to comprise the narratives. They also serve to undermine the official history then sanctioned by the Taiwan government and enforced by both its schools and its police. In exploring the question of the manner in which local events transform the general
category of Chinese diasporic cinema into something specifically Taiwanese, the dilemmas surrounding identity created by the country’s historical circumstances are central.
- 23 - Historical Context
Probing Taiwan’s past was necessary because the government of the Taiwan where Hou grew up pursued a project of constructing a national identity built on a series of lies. The first of these lies was that the Kuomintang Party (KMT), which took over Taiwan at the end of World War II, was the legitimate ruler of all of China. In fact, the KMT and its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, had been decisively defeated in 1949 by the communist People’s Liberation Army after years of civil war. Having fled to Taiwan, its continued existence was owed to the military umbrella of the United States, who
stationed its 7th Fleet in the Strait of Taiwan in 1950, at the beginning of the Korean War. Through strict control of the information media and education ministry, the KMT
asserted a claim to be the “rightful heir” to thousands of years of Chinese imperial tradition and for decades maintained the pretence that a triumphant return to reassert control over mainland China was imminent (Yip 139). The generation of refugees from the mainland that believed this is well represented in Hou’s work, notably the parents in A Time to Live, a Time to Die, who own only cheap bamboo furniture because a return “home” can happen any time.
The second lie was that the KMT takeover of Taiwan was both nonviolent and popular. The island, located about 180 km off the southeast coast of mainland China, had been a colony of Japan since 1895, but was transferred to KMT control with the Japanese surrender in 1945. Since most of the population was ethnic Chinese, there was initially popular support for a return to Chinese rule. However, the mixture of incompetence, corruption and brutality that would result in the KMT being chased off the mainland was soon in evidence in Taiwan. The new overlords centralized police, military, judicial and
- 24 - administrative powers, and then filled all but the lowest positions with new arrivals from the mainland while squeezing out the native Taiwanese (Udden 92). Protests against the regime led to the notorious “228 incident,” when, on February 28, 1947, soldiers fired into a mob of demonstrators. In the aftermath, the KMT briefly lost control of the island, until troop reinforcements arrived and plunged into an orgy of indiscriminate killing. In the immediate aftermath, roughly 30,000-40,000 Taiwanese were murdered or
“disappeared.” Some estimate the death toll to have been as high as 100,000 (Udden 94-95). Martial law was declared in 1949 and a “White Terror” that targeted leftists and any other regime opponents was conducted throughout the 1950s and 60s. By the time martial law ended in 1987, Taiwan had 29,000 political prisoners, many of them tortured, between three and four thousand executed, and hundreds of thousands of others attacked, persecuted, or otherwise harassed (Udden 134). For nearly forty years, the government denied the 1947 massacre had even occurred (Udden 17) and to bring up the subject of the 228 Incident during the martial law period was grounds for a charge of treason (Udden 95).
The third lie was that there was no division between the Taiwanese and the newcomers. The refugees from the mainland, known as waishengren (“outer province people”), would come to make up roughly 15% of the population. The 1945-1949 period saw them arrive in a growing flood, with 1.5 million landing in 1949 alone (Udden 21). The Taiwanese of Chinese descent resident before 1945, known as benshengren
(“original province people”), are roughly 84% of the population, with aboriginals making up the remaining 1%. In the wake of the 228 Incident, the government ensured the benshengren would have a prominent role in the economy and benefit from economic
- 25 - development, but political offices were tightly controlled by the waishengren (Udden 22). In addition, the KMT used its control of education and the information media to impose a single, mainland Chinese culture by suppressing anything seen as “distinctly Taiwanese” (Udden 24). For example, beginning in 1951, and extending into the 1970s, only
Mandarin, the mother tongue of the majority of mainland Chinese and most of the
waishengren, was taught in schools, with any use of Taiwanese or other minority Chinese dialects harshly punished (Udden 24). This created a gap between the official Taiwan, with a fossilized and homogenous “Chinese” culture, and the real Taiwan society which, as Douglas Kellner writes, “is genuinely hybridized, containing an amalgam of many different cultures, ranging from various Chinese traditions, Japanese or European colonizers, and U.S. and global culture” (Kellner).
These three lies were interdependent and mutually reinforcing. As June Yip notes, the KMT’s “institutionalized remembrance and careful preservation of a ‘coherent’
Chinese tradition” that it could claim to be heir to was ultimately reliant on “organized forgetting” (139). This has an effect on any definition of Taiwanese identity. James Udden argues that this “imaginary” existence has eventually trained the Taiwanese, regardless of background, to reject the ontology of “imagined community” that typically provides a group with its shared sense of national identity (13). This is the background to the filmmakers identified with Taiwanese New Cinema in the 1980s seeing one of their chief objectives as being to challenge the official version of history through construction of “historical representations of the ‘Taiwanese experience’ on film” and “claim
cinematic space for Taiwanese ‘popular memory’” (Yip 140). By showing Taiwan life as it really was instead of the way the government pretended it was, they intended to help
- 26 - foster the kind of shared national identity the KMT had failed to provide during its long years in power. At the very least, rejection of the official fictions left filmmakers, as it left all Taiwanese, with the question that if being Taiwanese is not what the government claimed it was, then what did it mean to be Taiwanese?
Hou Hsiao-hsien
Hou Hsiao-hsien was born in 1947 in Guangdong, mainland China, and moved to Taiwan at the age of two. His family belonged to the transient Hakka minority, which had been at times the subject of persecution from mainland China’s Han majority. This community spoke the Hoklea dialect rather than Mandarin, and was one of the sources of pre-1945 migrants to Taiwan. Although Hou was not raised in a Hoklea-speaking
community, Udden plausibly suggests his linguistic minority background pushed him away from identification with other waishengren. Another influence he points to is Hou’s growing up in a small town in southern Taiwan, where most of his contemporaries were benshengren, and where he consequently became fluent in Taiwanese. (Udden 17-18, Kellner). It is certain that Hou’s version of Taiwan is multilingual rather than the officially sanctioned Mandarin-speaking image preferred by the government. Mutual incomprehension between language groups existing underneath the facade of a single “Chinese” culture surfaces frequently in Hou’s films. Notable examples include the inability of villagers to understand the grandmother asking for directions to China in A Time to Live, a Time to Die and a negotiation between gangsters increasing in tension because of a laborious translation process in A City of Sadness. An additional factor in Hou’s alienation from the waishengren was the premature death of his father, a low-level bureaucrat who initially expected to return to China after a brief sojourn in Taiwan. This
- 27 - item of family history may also be related to the frequent identification of patriarchal authority figures with China and traditional values, and the displacement of these figures during the course of Hou’s narratives (Tay 157-158). For whatever specific reason (or reasons), Hou developed a sense of rootlessness related to his diasporic status. He may have identified with the benshengren, but he knew he was not one of them. As he tells Olivier Assayas in HHH: “You felt like there was no family graveyard. You just don't belong."
The film industry that Hou entered in the late 1970s was, as it had been since the arrival of the KMT, exclusively government-financed and controlled (Kellner). Until the early 1960s, only a handful of feature films were produced, and they served the
government’s propaganda ends. For example, Together Forever (1951, Xu Xinfu) claimed that any friction between benshengren and waishengren was the fault of communist troublemakers (Udden 30). An example of the thoroughness of KMT censorship in this period regarding representations of the mainland is that even its own propaganda films could not show any Communist Party flags or emblems, or any image of mainland Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Udden 31). Even after
government control relaxed, a film such as Spring Outside of the Fence (1986, Lee You-ning) was typical in eliding any difference between mainlander and islander, offering a nostalgic melodrama that presented a history of Taiwan from 1949 through to the 1980s in which there were only former mainlanders (and their children). Even after the end of martial law, filmmakers remained circumspect. Yu Kan-ping’s People Between Two Chinas (1989), a drama where a married Taiwanese businessman and his family reunites in the “neutral ground” of Hong Kong with the family he left behind in China in 1949,
- 28 - only hints at Taiwan’s ethnic friction. The Taiwanese wife may feel inferior to her mainlander husband and fear he will return to his Chinese wife, but it is ultimately all in her mind, and her understanding this is the key to making the temporary reunion a success.
Beginning in the 1960s, the Taiwanese government attempted to go beyond straightforward propaganda by encouraging a style known as “healthy realism,” which featured stories of the everyday life of “common people,” usually set in rural areas, which mixed paeans to economic development with affirmations of traditional values (Udden 16-17). Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh describes these films as an attempt “to define a national cinema coded with cultural harmony, agricultural progress, and development” (165). They presented an idealized Taiwan with no ethnic strife and where everybody spoke Mandarin. The heroes were often government employees, and embodied the ideal of an accountable and efficient administration. This laundered version of Taiwan life was at odds with the reality of endemic political oppression and a popular expression (among benshengren, at least) being “getting involved in politics is like eating dog shit” (Udden 19).
Hou’s early films were not far from the “healthy realism” template. For example, The Green Green Grass of Home (1983) features a young schoolteacher from Taipei (pop singer Kenny Bee) who learns to appreciate the small town and its traditional values, wooing a pretty fellow teacher (played by another pop singer, Meifeng Chen) while leading a crusade to save a local river from pollution, with full and admiring help from the local authorities. This film is, of course, not typical of his subsequent work, but it has some interesting pointers to it. There is the dichotomy between city and country, with the
- 29 - countryside associated with traditional values and an ambivalent attitude toward the modernity of Taipei, which is represented by the teacher’s upstanding parents, but also by his trashy ex-girlfriend. Also, while Hou did not attempt an honest portrayal of relations between ethnic groups, he did include a sympathetic aboriginal family and at least hinted at the existence of racial discrimination in an otherwise nearly perfect society.
Rather than discussing Hou’s films chronologically, this thesis suggests that a fruitful approach would be to explore them in terms of their primary spatial relationships. In A Time to Live, A Time to Die and A Summer at Grandpa’s, the central contrast is between a family house and the countryside outside of it. In The Boys from Fengkuei and Dust in the Wind it is between small rural town and large industrial city. In A City of Sadness, the opposition is not between opposing spaces, but over spaces that are contested between native Taiwanese and encroaching mainland Chinese. Finally, in Good Men, Good Women and Goodbye South, Goodbye, the binary is between interiors and exteriors that represent idealized and realistic versions of mainland China.
Analyzing these spatial representations using the model proposed in the introduction that identifies “home” (associated with the immigrant homeland), “host” (associated with the adopted country) and “intermediate” (the contested area where the two cultures meet) spaces will situate these films as diasporic cinema and suggest possible answers to the questions raised in the films concerning Taiwanese identity and how local circumstances have transformed any notion of pan-Chinese national cinema.
While Hou’s films are not typically discussed as diasporic, they possess many characteristics associated with transnational cinema. They are made by a filmmaker who arrived in Taiwan as a child and is conscious of his difference from the majority
- 30 - population. This sense of not belonging is reflected in narratives which hinge on the arrival of an outsider protagonist. Several are journey narratives that retell the
immigrant’s passage in coded form and posit a homeland in a community’s collective idealized vision of mainland China. Beyond this, characteristics listed by Naficy as central to accented films that are also found in Hou’s work include the use of multiple languages, having ethnically coded mise-en-scène and iconography, the inscription of the filmmaker’s voice in the film text, the recreation of exile or structured absences of characters that echo the experience of losing direct contact with family members and foregrounding the use of letters and telephone calls to bridge distances and evoke the presence of an absent person. Above all, most of these films present protagonists whose identities are in the process of being defined through the hybridization of the culture they start out with and the one they encounter.
A Time to Live, a Time to Die (1985) and A Summer at Grandpa’s (1984)
A Time to Live, a Time to Die is an autobiographical memory piece that strings together episodes from Hou’s childhood and teenage years, structured around three deaths. The first section of the film, when Ah-ha1 is around 8 years old, ends with his father’s death. His senior year in high school seven years later coincides with his
mother’s illness and death, while the period immediately after this ends, as the film does, with the removal of his grandmother’s decomposing body from the living room floor. Each death marks a stage in the weakening of the family’s ties with the Chinese mainland and absorption of the second generation into a polyglot Taiwanese culture.
1 Hou’s actual hometown nickname, as shown in the Assayas documentary when he returns home and reintroduces himself to former friends under that name.
- 31 - Hou differentiates the family house from the town that surrounds it in several ways. Except for Ah-ha and his grandmother, who is constantly getting lost, family members are rarely seen outside the home; the father never is. Ah-ha speaks Hoklea inside the home, Taiwanese to his friends in the town and Mandarin in school (Kellner). Hou creates a “flowing, expansive” interior through the use of wide angle shots that emphasize its airiness and the communal aspect of their lives, often showing several family members in the same shot engaged in different activities (Udden 72). The home is associated with China through letters that update them on events there and by the
observance of traditional customs, such as when the father, being “pious,” will not begin dinner unless the grandmother is there. This makes a strong contrast to the end of the film, when the sons of the house don’t notice their grandmother has died until after her body starts to rot, which the autobiographical narrator describes as “unfilial,” a stinging reproach in traditional Chinese culture. Above all, the family’s and its house’s ties to China are foregrounded in what Hou claims are the only two points that were invented for the film: the family having inexpensive bamboo furniture so that it can be discarded rather than shipped “home” when the mainland is recovered, and the grandmother’s repeated attempts to walk home to China (Udden 69, Tay 155). As Udden notes, these inventions indicate Hou “was after a deeper message of how a new home came to be the only home he has ever known” (75). These fictional additions also serve to transform the film from a tale of a single family into a representative narrative of a diasporic generation.
The associations with China are not entirely positive. Rays of sunlight normally flood the family home, but a downpour darkens the sky and suggests a negative side to the house and homeland it is associated with when Ah-ha’s mother tells his sister about
- 32 - how her other daughter died, essentially from neglect because she wasn’t a boy in a culture that only valued sons. Later, in a posthumous memoir read and related to the family by Ah-ha’s sister, the father writes of how he only expected to stay a few years before going back to the mainland and that this attachment to China led to the decision to own only cheap furniture and postpone buying appliances which would have made their mother’s life easier. As she reads the memoir, the camera shifts to include the father’s empty bamboo chair in the frame, conjuring his presence and the wasted years implied by his message from the grave. In the Assayas documentary, Hou says his intended message here was that “those calls for reclaiming mainland China are nothing but a bunch of lies, impossible dreams.” Another reflection of this darker side is that at times the house itself becomes less expansive and airy. While windows or doors open to the outside are visible in almost every interior shot, partly due to Hou’s reliance on natural light, there are exceptions. When the family sits vigil by their father’s corpse, the camera pans over them, cutting down the space so that no windows or doors are seen. This is also true when the mother first mentions the lump on her tongue which turns out to be cancer. As well as the absence of a visible opening to the outside, she is framed in a doorway which transforms the interior space from expansive and nurturing to confining and ominous.
However, an interesting aspect of the film is that there is not a strict separation between the family house (representing both mainland China and the diasporic
community now in Taiwan) and the exterior landscape. The (almost) constantly visible doors and windows being open to the outside at times unite interior and exterior space, suggesting that in some scenes the countryside can also be associated with mainland China. The muted colours of the house’s interior that result from Hou’s use of natural
- 33 - light are matched by the soft, muddy brown that dominates the first shot of the town as the grandmother in her traditional outfit (which is rarely worn by anyone else in the film) walks through the village, convinced that her mainland hometown is just around the next bend. This partial identification of the countryside with traditional mainland China reappears in some of Hou’s other films, and is used here in an interesting way.
If, under the analytical model proposed in the introduction, the family house is designated “home” space, the Taiwanese “host” space is divided in two. The first is an official Mandarin version of Taiwan represented onscreen only by the school with its unlikeable Mandarin-speaking teacher, but is otherwise only inferred through the random appearance of soldiers on horseback galloping through town, half-ignored radio
broadcasts that tell of conflicts with the mainland, and the rumbling of trucks
(presumably transporting troops) that wake the family in the middle of the night before they roll over and go back to sleep. Like these sounds of war, the school is mostly associated with conflict, either among the students or between rebellious youth and an authoritarian teacher.
The real Taiwan is that of Ah-ha’s friends, and is associated with the colour green, primarily in shots of a lush landscape and the baize cover of pool tables, a cultural marker that Hou uses in many of his films. The conflict between these two Taiwans is shown in a scene where Ah-ha, now a teenager, and his friends play pool in a rundown shed (painted a faded green), while former soldiers outside are seen through a barred window listening to the funeral of a major political figure on the radio, which the teens ignore. Udden notes that this funeral is usually considered the “true end” of the Cold War years and the beginning of an era marked by economic growth and industrialization (75). Just
- 34 - as with Ah-ha’s family, the memory of China was fading for the ageing waishengren of official Taiwan, as the next generation is absorbed into the hybrid culture of the real Taiwan.
The “intermediate” space is where Ah-ha interacts with the local boys, and can be seen as being expressed through a narrative arc where the landscape changes from brown and confining to green and expansive. While the first exterior shot of the town made it seem as an extension of home space, the first shot of Ah-ha interacting with local boys is in a game of marbles which is shot atypically close, cutting down the space so that, in contrast to the house, the overall geography is not clear. Subsequent exterior scenes, such as a baseball game (not coincidentally a non-Chinese sport), are more expansive and occur in a greener landscape. The climax of this progression is a scene where the
grandmother takes Ah-ha along as she tries to walk back to China. On a green and leafy, tree-lined lane, they stop and pick guavas and later eat bowls of noodles at a roadside stall where the local Taiwanese can’t understand the Hoklea-speaking grandmother. This is a key scene, its transitional nature underscored by the train that passes behind them as they eat their noodles. As Udden writes, this sequence is “more than just another detail: it symbolizes the arc of the film . . . an arc of forgetting, the fading away of thoughts about the mainland” (75). The grandmother has spent the whole film to this point talking of China and trying to walk there, but even she can be distracted by the island’s tasty green fruit, while her inability to communicate with the locals underlines that mainland China is anything but around the next corner.
Soon after, the father dies, the death of the ailing patriarch signifying a major break between the family and mainland China, and the film jumps forward several years.
- 35 - The grandmother still gets lost, but there is no more talk of walking “home,” but instead she returns at one point with a bag of guavas. After the mother’s death, the grandmother remains inside, mostly sleeping on the floor as family life carries on around her, until she finally dies. Her death is only discovered after several days and this neglect can be seen as an allegorical representation of “the discarded older Chinese generation, never
assimilated, always out of place, and never at home” (Kellner). Her death also reveals a younger generation that is assimilated, as shown by the way they treat their grandmother.
June Yip writes that this film constructs a Taiwanese identity “shaped by multiple waves of refugees, immigrants, and colonials and characterized by linguistic and cultural diversity” (140), which was, of course, a challenge to the government’s image of the country. As Tay observes, the film is only “seemingly apolitical,” for its hybridity “confronts the sensitive issue of provincial identity differences” (159). But this hybrid identity does not receive an entirely uncritical representation. If the official Taiwan is authoritarian and imposed from above, the Taiwan Ah-ha is absorbed into in the second half of the film is a valueless one of juvenile delinquents, small time criminals and incipient gangsters. For example, a sequence where Ah-ha and his petty thug friends unsuccessfully try to shake down an itinerant peddler plays out in an open area,
dominated by the brown dirt of the street, but also features the green baize of an open air pool table they are playing on. This expansive exterior is not exactly oppressive, but suggests the Taiwan Ah-ha is now a part of is less attractive than the green landscapes of the first half of the film. This raises a question that often arises in Hou’s films, of what is left when traditional Chinese culture is abandoned.
